Google News Help: “Editors’ Picks is a feature that showcases original, innovative news content that a news publisher has on their site at any given time. This content may include long-form narrative articles, slideshows, interactive graphics, or video stories, just to name a few possibilities. – The links you see in Editors’ Picks are hand-picked by the news organization whose logo is displayed above the links. Google News does not select the articles. – If you are a News publisher and wish to submit an Editors’ Picks feed to Google News, please review our guidelines and documentation first.”

Google: “Google News is introducing a new section in the right-hand column of the U.S. edition. The section is called ‘Editors’ Picks,’ and it displays original content that publishers have selected as highlights from their publications. This is the latest addition to recent improvements we’ve made to the variety and presence of stories and multimedia on Google News. – An array of news organizations, including local, national and niche publishers, are now using Editors’ Picks to display their best, most engaging content. Because Google News relies on algorithms, Editors’ Picks will always be just that- picks provided by publishers themselves, and not by Google. … You may have first noticed Editors’ Picks as an experiment last year. Based on the data from that experiment, we have been working with nearly two dozen publishers in recent months and have seen a positive response from readers and publishers alike: readers get the news they’re interested in from the sources they trust, and publishers receive higher traffic to their websites.”

Nieman: “When Google News launched in 2002, it did so with some declarations: ‘This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors.’ And: ‘No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.’ – That core approach – computerized curation, algorithmic authority, NoMo sapiens – has served Google News well in the nearly-a-decade it’s been around… Editors’ Picks, a display of original content that journalists (human ones!) have selected as editorial highlights from their publications. … That’s a big deal, and only partially because of Google News’ traditional algo-centricism. … In addition to providing users with more good content, Editors’ Picks might also pave the way for more effective partnerships with news publishers. … For publishers, Editors’ Picks is also a way to highlight brand identity within a platform that has tended to emphasize news stories over news institutions. … It takes the notion of serendipity, in other words, and applies it to news organizations themselves.”

SEL: “More than a year after the experiment began, Google News has brought Editor’s Picks to the home page of its US site – marking the first real human-curated content on what Google has proudly said was always a completely algorithmic way of presenting news. – It could also be seen as something of an olive branch toward publishers, especially given the shaky relationship that’s existed between the two.”

SEW: “This appears to be a win-win for everyone involved. News publishers now have a mechanism to let Google know what their featured stories are. – Readers will be able to see additional content in the form of these features. As a result, Google will likely see a boost in on-site time and stickiness. Clearly the number of articles you read will help you collect Google News badges. – However, bringing search back into the conversation for a moment: since these articles are hand-picked by the editors – which may include editorials and paid features – will this adversely affect relevancy?“

HuffPo: “AOL Inc. announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire The Huffington Post, the influential and rapidly growing news, analysis, and lifestyle website founded in 2005, which now counts nearly 25 million unique monthly visitors. … The transaction will create a premier global, national, local, and hyper-local content group for the digital age – leveraged across online, mobile, tablet, and video platforms. The combination of AOL’s infrastructure and scale with The Huffington Post’s pioneering approach to news and innovative community building among a broad and sophisticated audience will mark a seminal moment in the evolution of digital journalism and online engagement. … As part of the transaction, Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, will be named president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, which will include all Huffington Post and AOL content, including Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino, AutoBlog, Patch, StyleList, and more.”

Huffington: “By combining HuffPost with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we’ll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform. … Far from changing our editorial approach, our culture, or our mission, this moment will be for HuffPost like stepping off a fast-moving train and onto a supersonic jet. We’re still traveling toward the same destination, with the same people at the wheel, and with the same goals, but we’re now going to get there much, much faster.”

ATD: “For AOL, the deal gives them a site that is very good at generating lots page views and impressions very efficiently–which is the company’s whole thrust these days. – That means lots more ad inventory to sell and an injection of content talent, giving AOL more scale it desperately needs. – The move also obviously gives AOL a much-needed editorial identity and cohesion, which it doesn’t really have. … Five time multiple to the Huffington Post’s $65 million in expected revenue for the coming year, one-eighth of AOL’s market valuation, the offer was accepted quickly.”

Guardian: “The sale to AOL marks a personal triumph for Ariana Huffington, the colourful and controversial co-founder of the site that bore her name, who under the terms of the deal is given a new role as president and editor in chief of a unit to be named Huffington Post Media Group, and includes management of AOL’s sprawling news operations and other media enterprises such as TechCrunch and MapQuest. … Originally a politics blog aimed at Democrats, the Huffington Post branched out into celebrity coverage and turned itself into one of the biggest pieces of real estate in online news media in the US, rapidly overtaking more established media organisations such as the Washington Post by deftly utilising the internet to exploit untapped markets.”

NYT: “The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline. … By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business. … One of The Huffington Post’s strengths has been creating an online community of readers with tens of millions of people. … The sale means a huge payout for Huffington Post investors and holders of its stock and options, who stand to profit earlier than if the company had waited to grow large enough for an initial public offering. … ‘The reason AOL is acquiring The Huffington Post is because we are absolutely passionate, big believers in the future of the Internet, big believers in the future of content,’ Mr. Armstrong said.”

RWW: “Can the Huffington Post strategy bring in as much or more revenue than that? While eyeballs have come online fast, ad revenues have been much slower to move. That’s in large part because in the old media world, advertisers used to say “half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half that is. So they bought both halves. Online, that’s not the case. Every click and every conversion is countable – so ad buys can be made much more rational. Thus much less media gets sponsored. It’s hard to say how this is all going to play out in the long run. – AOL is making a strong move, though, in spending more than an entire financial quarter’s subscription revenue on one big content shop and its leadership.”

TC: “Arianna Huffington’s genius is to churn out enough SEO crap to bring in the traffic and then to use the resulting advertising revenue – and her personal influence – to employ top class reporters and commentators to drag the quality average back up. And somehow it works. In the past six months journostars like Howard Fineman, Timothy L. O’Brien and Peter Goodman have all been added to the HuffPo’s swelling masthead, and rather than watering down the site’s political voice, it has stayed true to its core beliefs. Such is the benefit of being bank-rolled by a rich liberal who doesn’t give a shit.”

WikiLeaks: “…is a not-for-profit media organisation. Our goal is to bring important news and information to the public. We provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to our journalists (our electronic drop box). One of our most important activities is to publish original source material alongside our news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth. We are a young organisation that has grown very quickly, relying on a network of dedicated volunteers around the globe. … WikiLeaks has combined high-end security technologies with journalism and ethical principles. Like other media outlets conducting investigative journalism, we accept (but do not solicit) anonymous sources of information. Unlike other outlets, we provide a high security anonymous drop box fortified by cutting-edge cryptographic information technologies. This provides maximum protection to our sources. We are fearless in our efforts to get the unvarnished truth out to the public. When information comes in, our journalists analyse the material, verify it and write a news piece about it describing its significance to society. We then publish both the news story and the original material in order to enable readers to analyse the story in the context of the original source material themselves.”

Wikipedia: “The term informational self-determination was first used in the context of a German constitutional ruling relating to personal information collected during the 1983 census. – In that occasion, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that: ‘[…] in the context of modern data processing, the protection of the individual against unlimited collection, storage, use and disclosure of his/her personal data is encompassed by the general personal rights of the [German Constitution]. This basic right warrants in this respect the capacity of the individual to determine in principle the disclosure and use of his/her personal data. Limitations to this informational self-determination are allowed only in case of overriding public interest.‘ – Informational self-determination is often considered similar to the right to privacy but has unique characteristics that distinguish it from the ‘Right to privacy’ in the United States tradition. Informational self-determination reflects Westin’s description of privacy: ‘The right of the individual to decide what information about himself should be communicated to others and under what circumstances‘ (Westin, 1970). In contrast, the ‘Right to privacy’ in the United States legal tradition is commonly considered to originate in Warren andBrandeis’ article, which focuses on the right to ‘solitude’ (i.e., being ‘left alone’) and in the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects persons and their belongings from warrantless search.”

Democracy Now: “Goodman: ‘…not all transparency advocates support what WikiLeaks is doing. Today we’ll host a debate. Steven Aftergood is one of the most prominent critics of WikiLeaks and one of the most prominent transparency advocates. … We’re also joined by Glenn Greenwald. He’s a constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com who’s supportive of WikiLeaks.’ … Aftergood: ‘I’m all for the exposure of corruption, including classified corruption. And to the extent that WikiLeaks has done that, I support its actions. The problem is, it has done a lot more than that, much of which is problematic. It has invaded personal privacy. It has published libelous material. It has violated intellectual property rights. And above all, it has launched a sweeping attack not simply on corruption, but on secrecy itself. And I think that’s both a strategic and a tactical error. It’s a strategic error because some secrecy is perfectly legitimate and desirable. It’s a tactical error because it has unleashed a furious response from the U.S. government and other governments that I fear is likely to harm the interests of a lot of other people besides WikiLeaks who are concerned with open government.’ … Greenwald: ‘If you look at the overall record of WikiLeaks – and let me just stipulate right upfront that WikiLeaks is a four-year-old organization, four years old. They’re operating completely unchartered territory. Have they made some mistakes and taken some missteps? Absolutely. They’re an imperfect organization. But on the whole, the amount of corruption and injustice in the world that WikiLeaks is exposing… I criticize them, for instance, for exercising insufficient care in redacting the names of various Afghan citizens who cooperated with the United States military. They accepted responsibility for that, and in subsequent releases, including in the Iraq document disclosures, they were very careful about redacting those names.'”

Reporters Without Borders: “Wikileaks has in the past played a useful role by making information available to the US and international public that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties which the Bush administration committed in the name of its war against terror. … But revealing the identity of hundreds of people who collaborated with the coalition in Afghanistan is highly dangerous. It would not be hard for the Taliban and other armed groups to use these documents to draw up a list of people for targeting in deadly revenge attacks. … Nonetheless, indiscriminately publishing 92,000 classified reports reflects a real problem of methodology and, therefore, of credibility. Journalistic work involves the selection of information. The argument with which you defend yourself, namely that Wikileaks is not made up of journalists, is not convincing. Wikileaks is an information outlet and, as such, is subject to the same rules of publishing responsibility as any other media. … Wikileaks must provide a more detailed explanation of its actions and must not repeat the same mistake. This will mean a new departure and new methods.”

Reporters Without Borders: “…condemns the blocking, cyber-attacks and political pressure being directed at cablegate.wikileaks.org, the website dedicated to the US diplomatic cables. The organization is also concerned by some of the extreme comments made by American authorities concerning WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. … We stress that any restriction on the freedom to disseminate this body of documents will affect the entire press, which has given detailed coverage to the information made available by WikiLeaks, with five leading international newspapers actively cooperating in preparing it for publication. – Reporters Without Borders would also like to stress that it has always defended online freedom and the principle of ‘Net neutrality,’ according to which Internet Service Providers and hosting companies should play no role in choosing the content that is placed online.”

Preston/Guardian: “Be clear, right from the start. Any editor presented with a quarter of a million US State Department documents on a WikiLeaks plate has a duty to sift, check – and publish. Newspapers exist to get news into print, not shilly-shally around as pompous (and, alas, often American) champions of the public’s right not to know too much. And if, thus far, the most unexpected story of the lot is Washington’s inability to keep its diplomatic traffic secret, that’s a public service, too. … At which point – casting aside assorted bits of legislation, editing codes and sheaves of moral guidance – a more basic test applies. Do you, printing the WikiLeaks bumper bundle, feel queasy or certain you’re trying to do the right thing? How would you feel if you didn’t print them? And, equally, would you feel chastened, angry, maybe ashamed, if your telephone hacking exploits were laid out to the full by Private Eye?” (Guardian’s WikiLeaks-coverage)